The mayor of a small Washington state city told The Daily World newspaper that he was surprised when he received a postcard from a 77-year-old man in Japan asking him to look out for items he lost in the tsunami a year and a half ago.

A Buddhist statue in a small fishing neighborhood in Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, has led a sharmed life, repeating history this year when it was washed away in the March 11 tsunami disaster and then recovered.

As the tsunami waters rose around him, one boy desperately stayed afloat clinging to his evacuation helmet. A refrigerator with no door floated past so he climbed inside, and survived by staying in his "lifeboat" until the danger eventually passed.

The crisis at the Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant following the March 11 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami has caused widespread radiation contamination - an issu that has cut deeply into the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and

"The disaster claimed the lives of people in the prime of their lives, young people with big dreams, and even children who made everyone smile. When I thought about the people who lost their loved ones, all I could do was fold paper cranes in prayer."

Since its formation in the wake of the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, American nonprofit organization All Hands has dispatched more than 6,000 volunteers to the scenes of more than a dozen disasters across te globe.

They watched in awe - both at the force of nature being displayed in front of them, and also at the foresight of their ancestors who, more than a century earlier, had relocated their village centre from the valley floor to the safety of the hill where ->>

An Israeli woman on Wednsday delivered about 30 blankets made by some 1,000 children and volunteers mainly in Israel to an orphanage in one of the cities ravaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami to lift the spirits of children there.

"I realized, if you could just peel off your skin, everyone all over the world is the same. We all have the same muscles, the same bones, two eyes, one mouth. I started looking at the problems all over the world, and wondering what I could do to help."

IITATE, Fukushima - Among those whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by the ongoing nuclear disaster triggered my the March 11 quake and tsunami are victims of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Officials in a city in northern South Korea collected 5 million won (about $4,560) in donaiton for victims of Japan's March 11 earthquake and tsunami, but used the money for a scholarship instead sue to a row over Japanese school texts, Yonhap news >>